Thursday, August 25, 2011

2v2 Arena Progress, Lessons, & Strategies Part 1

Follow our progress, the lessons we learn, and the strategies we try as we enter into Arena pvp with no experience and climb to the top!

Before I begin let me just say this. When my friend Kofo and I started playing 2v2 Arenas for the first time 3 months ago in June 2011, we had no prior pvp experience and were just looking for fun. We had no idea about comps, strategies, or anything of the sort. Not to mention both of us were heavy clickers. Meaning we clicked most of our hotkeys instead of keybinding them. Since then we've learned quite a bit and have gone through alot of frustration in order to improve our gameplay and actually enjoy the pvp, because for awhile it was just plain old aggrivating. ^_^.

What are you going to be discussing here?

In this article I'm going to show our arena progress from the very beginning, the strategies we've tried, their results, and the lessons we've learned from them.

What did you do to get ready for Arena's and how did you do when you first started?

Well, now that our minds were made up and we wanted to give PvP a try we decided to grind BG's for a few days and equip ourselves in full blue Bloodthirsty armor, which was the best we could get at the time. This was near the end of Season 9. At this time I was mostly a clicker, had a messy UI, and not very good at PvP in general. The video to the right will show you the beginning of our PvP experience. Its small so view in fullscreen.

While making this video I realized that there were several things I was doing wrong and needed to change ASAP if I wanted to compete at all in PvP. The major problem was the fact I was a clicker. The fact I clicked my skills had me at a huge disadvantage. My reaction time was considerably slower then my opponents, I could only do a few things at once, and I had a hard time trying to place shadowfury quickly as I tried to survive. I also realized that I would be the first target in Arenas the majority of the time and had to improve myself alot if I wanted to survive long enough for us to even stand a chance at winning. At the time of this video we won about 1 out of 3 of the games we played.

What did you do to improve your gameplay as a Destruction Warlock?

Now that I knew what I had to overcome first the real challenge began. I had to change my old habits and stop clicking my skills. The first thing I did was completly change my Interface. I got rid of all my addons and went back to the generic Warcraft interface. Then I went and downloaded Macaroon, an add-on from curse gaming that helped me redo my hotkey bars and set keybinds for every single skill I had. After that, I played in BGs NON-STOP until I felt comfortable with my new setup and my new playstyle came naturally. It took me 4 days of BG after BG to feel confident again and I made another video. This video shows me 4 days after I switched from clicking to keybinding and re-did my Interface completly.

How did you do in Arenas after the change? Was it worth the effort?

We did great! It was DEFINETLY worth the effort! 2 Days after the making of the last video we decided to try arenas again and test our progress. The results were astonishing! We went 11-1! With this, I was convinced I was on the right track and decided to look for more things about myself to fix. Little did I know that things would get ALOT more difficult later on as our rating started to climb. For now though my confidence was high and I was ready to arena some more. Unfortunetly though season 9 came to an end the following week and we had to wait almost an entire month before we could try some more. During the month we had off from Arenas we both BG'd alot to make sure we wouldnt get rusty and saved up honor points for the season 10 BG rewards.

How did things go once Season 10 started?

Average. We won about half the games we played, and we played alot. It was partly due to the fact that since a new season started EVERYONE was back at 0 rating so we got matched up against other new PvP'ers like us and seasoned pvpers alike. Either that or there were just alot more people searching for games now so we met up with alot stiffer competition then we did at the end of season 9. Either way, one thing was clear. We were having alot of CC problems. If I stopped dpsing to CC somebody and only Kofo was left on Dps, the person just simply wouldn't die. If Kofo stopped to CC somebody and it was only me on Dps they still wouldn't die. Sometimes it wouldnt matter either way though and they just dropped like flies in a few hits. I think that was due to the gear difference since we kept up on honor and had the best BG equipment from the start. When gear was even though it was a definite problem and something had to be done if we wanted to move up in rating. At this time we were stuck at about 1300~ rating. Winning 50% of the games we played kept us right around that mark.

How did you fix the CC problem?

The first thought I had was to try and ditch my Felhunter for the Succubus. It would allow me to CC without stopping my dps. I tried playing with the Succubus in some BGs to see how it worked but it wasn't really a good test. Most fights were either zerg fests or a fight were CC wasnt even needed at all. So, we decided to sacrifice some rating and MM value to go test it in Arenas and see how it worked out. At this time I just put seduction on autocast and my pet on Assist mode. So if I was attacking someone it would automatically seduce the other person and then switch back to my target and dps when it couldn't.

Once you got use to this strategy were you able to raise your rating with it?

The answer is no. While we won more games then we lost with this strategy when it pitted us against someone with a MM rating over 1500 which was quite often we would simply get annihilated. Against a team with a MM rating closer to ours it worked out really well as shown in the video to the right, but in the end we lost more rating from losing to people 1500+ then we gained from beating people in the 1300~ range. Clearly something else had to change but I had no idea what. One thing became clear through all the 2v2s we did though and that was that 2v2s are extremely comp bias. Meaning if you go against a comp your comp is weak against its practically impossiable to win as long as they know what their doing.

So what did you do?

Something had to change but we didn't know what. And Kofo at the time had just finished leveling a warrior alt to 85 so we decided to have him BG and get his warrior fully pvp geared. Once Kofo's warrior was geared for PvP I decided to switch to Affliction and try that out. We played a few BGs to get use to our new class and spec but mainly we wanted to learn it in an arena setting, so we decided once again to sacrifice Rating and MM value to try it out. At the time we didn't really expect it to work out and it was mainly for fun and to get rid of some frustration. The result turned out to be pretty bad. While it was fun we did horriable. We had to re-learn our target priorities and how to work well together. Our main problem were Mages. Counterspell combined with frost nova spam on the warrior was hard to beat. Rogues however became easy targets. A good change of pace as before they were the most difficult for us to beat.

So now what? Did you stick with Affliction or go back to Destruction?

I went back to Destruction and Kofo went back to his Moonkin. It just wasnt working. We decided to keep trying our Destruction Lock / Moonkin comp and hope as we got more experience it would just become easier on its own. We ended up being half right. While some things did get easier no matter what we did we still couldnt get over 1350~ rating. By now it was already week 3 of Season 10. The video I made at the time is to the right. It probably wasnt the comps fault, but more our own. For now though we needed a confidence booster and the only thing that could do that was a fresh start with something new. So, we decided for the time being to go with something new.

Want to know what we tried next? What comp finially worked?
How did we get past 1500~ rating?